Graham Higgins Illustration

There was a suggestion that today I’d be admitted to hospital for surgery tomorrow, Dec 9th, so I rang yesterday to check.

Ah… well… yes, did nobody call me? That date was only provisional, they had said that, as they had about the appointment on the 1st and the two dates mooted last month. The latest almost definitely certain provisional date is Dec 30th, right in the heart of the seasonal drink-drive demolition derby – a bonanza, however, for the military trauma-surgeons seconded to Selly Oak.

I have to assume that the consultants who first told me that surgery was essential imminently weren’t exaggerating, but each time the appointment is pushed back it’s pushed back further and I guess we’re all getting used to my op being ‘pending’.

In a couple of months my reserves of money will run out, which may as well be a medical condition because i can’t decide to give up money, but for the moment each day is a purposeless drift on a stream of denial.

The flattening effects of beta-blockers seem to contribute but the phrase I used in a recent email describes the quality of the mental landscape: ‘I find myself with an analytical mind that searches for meaning or worth in the data displayed in the brain.’

Still trying to think of anything that might be of general interest in a public email,  I recently had an invitation to apply for a poetry mentoring scheme, which reminded me of a similarly-titled scheme I began about four years ago, offered as part of an Arts Council funded writers’ group project to popularise poetry.

That scheme sounded a lot like the kind of funding-application tick-boxing I’d seen before, where the creative thought goes into how little the funding-recipients have to do to evidence fulfilment of current buzz-word criteria, but I said at the outset that I’d take it as a pretext to method-act ‘being a writer’: to write and read poetry every day and review the accumulated results at the end of the six months. For the duration I’d send my mentor a routine email a week of writing, notes and queries as my understanding and relationship to writing developed – envelopes of journal-pages posted en route from what no doubt we’d have ended up calling My Journey.

The mentoring such as it was lasted about a couple of months before I suggested to the mentor that in the face of such underwhelming interest it would be better if I bowed out in time for someone else to benefit.

I ended up with notebooks and a computer-folder of writing with nowhere to go so it occurred to me that some of it may as well go here, but that I should first record some caveats.

First is that I hesitate to call it poetry. For my own peace of mind I think of it as ‘art-writing’ because it’s language used and arranged in unusual ways, often like a collage composed with found-objects. All clear writing of course requires careful draughting; art-writing is more geared to listening for chimes and rhythms in the flow, and vocabulary made to behave unexpectedly appropriately.

I was perfectly happy to accept that my writing didn’t attain the state of poetry but I did on occasion wonder why if mine wasn’t, certain poets’ writing *was*. I mentioned one poet whose writing seemed to me to resemble unremarkable emails typed while the cat randomly pawed the Return key.

In accepting my resignation from the scheme my mentor referred to my ‘frankly offensive… name-calling’ and wished that I ‘enjoy [my] lexicon’, which I take to be a literary version of ‘oo-er, swallowed a dictionary’.

Hmm. It’s one of my personal clichés that the extent of your vocabulary represents the pixel-resolution of your thought. Lyrics rarely benefit from specialised vocabulary but up at the poetry end of the street you have a bit more space to hang exotic fabrics out to air.

My mentor much admired one prominent poet who ‘never used vocabulary he wouldn’t use with his friends at the pub’ to which I replied ‘me either’. It doesn’t sound like a resounding compliment to claim that I write for common people like you.

Anyway, this dispiriting mismatch put me off writing and reading poetry for ages – no loss to the poetry world but I did miss that crossword-puzzling play of language for a while.

Given that poetry on a blog is the cyberspace equivalent of writing under the arch of a canal-bridge I shall just pause to take a pull on my virtual can of export lager and tell myself that this one isn’t intended to be particularly profound.

Menu

Poached Haiku:

A traditional favourite

made from an exotic blend of three lines

and seventeen syllables (not illustrated)

Choose from: Moon, rain, herons, Autumn breeze, or your bamboo flute

On a bed of wistful nostalgia.

Haunch of Satire:

Pack-hunted game flushed out, brought down,

And carved slowly into heroic couplets.

Skewered, roasted morsels of bloody cheek

With unmitigated sauce.

Beating Heart Of Romance:

Breathless moments of souls’ communion

Presented palpitating at your table,

Stolen with trembling fingers

From the warm occluded bosom of the Night

And tossed aside.

Regular sonnet, or try our new French-style Villanelle.

Crow Tartare.

Crow. Dead.

Just that. Black scratch

Punched from a grey sky,

Lead ballasted

Clawed to the Earth’s millstone breast.

It has passed over, gone

To meet the choir invisible.

Mute, on a plate,

With mash, chips, or gravel.

It is a Crow. Dead.

(Ask for lamb’s head with the whole earth for its body in season.)

And now youre meal is nearly done

Time to relax and have some fun

Our corny cracker’s can’t fail to please

When served with a nice slice of ripe cheese.

(Regards to yourself on a sincere basis:

We can’t be perfect – but we try hard!!!

Why not let us ‘cook you up’ a very special birthday card!?)

OR

Confit of bon mots:

Pert aperçus in light verse

Jeux d’esprit wrapped in badinage

Belles lettres enveloped in velum

with essence of Zeitgeist.

Traditional and current puns

Flourished with a soupçon of je ne sais quoi.

Coffee and a Lucky behind plate glass in a no-star diner and with it

That whole Jackson Pollock chickenscratch neon drizzled on wet sidewalks

sodium-light sulphate-sour bebop sax solo stream-of-the-flow vibe

Is good to go.

That’s all she wrote.